fewer than 50 employees, according to a
May 2007 report produced by the QPN;
only 3 percent employ more than 300. But
companies with more than 300 employees
offer 27 percent of the jobs; companies
that employ more than 100 and fewer than
300 workers make up 38 percent of the
job market.

Corriveau said that, because Québec’s
photonics companies tend to be smaller, as
opposed to mass-production companies,
“they were less affected by the economic
crisis.”

Québec has a striking spirit of cooperation between researchers and businesses –
even those competing for the same funding and the same customer base seem to
have little difficulty pooling resources to
develop photonic solutions.

“Québec City is spread over a relatively
small area with a tightly knit society. So
the members of the scientific and engineering community know each other
or/and they have common contacts. The
same can also be said for the commercial
community and others,” Têtu said. “That’s
probably why we can more easily partner
on a collaborative effort. This being said,
we also recognize that the market is international, and the competition is international. So we have to join efforts to face
the challenge of being competitive at the
international level.”

Elsewhere in Canada

Other regions of Canada are a little less
organized than Québec and Ontario in
their efforts to take advantage of photonics, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t
glimmers of activity.

Research
4%

Other
3%

Health Care & LifeSciences15%

The prairie provinces – Alberta,
Saskatchewan and Manitoba – have 95
photonics companies, employing almost
3000 people among the three of them. In
British Columbia, there are 50 companies,
creating more than 2000 jobs.

And even the Atlantic provinces, which
are made up of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Prince Edward
Island, have a total of eight companies
that employ more than 300 people among
them. Collectively, the prairies, the Atlantic provinces and British Columbia generate 796 million CAD, far less than the 3. 6
billion CAD raked in by Ontario and
Québec. There do not appear to be any
photonics companies in the Northwest
Territories, the Yukon Territory or
Nunavut.

Several glimmers of photonics activity
outside Ontario and Québec are occurring
at institutions such as the University of
Alberta in Edmonton and the National
Research Council’s National Institute of
Nanotechnology, which also is in Edmonton and is affiliated with the university.
There also are photonics groups and
projects at other universities, including the
University of Victoria in British Columbia,
the University of British Columbia in
Vancouver and the University of Calgary
in Alberta. The University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon is home to the Canadian
Light Source, the national center for synchrotron research.

Because Ontario and Québec have done
so well with the cluster model, the CPC has
encouraged the other provinces to develop
a focused plan and a dedicated cluster to
support and promote photonics innovation.